I Spent 100 Hours Perfecting Topology in Blender

meet Bren he recently joined 3D Beast academy hejl uh I created an assault rifle model to practice hard surface modeling and weapon design but I've been struggling with topology issues especially in subd modeling I often encounter errors like resing finching and uh veress being merged and it's really challenging especially without guidance so do you have any tips for troubleshooting when Brent asked me for help I jumped at the chance to assist my student and also challenged myself to step outside my comfort zone switching from Maya to blunder a software that I'm still learning I promise Brun a subd model with perfect topology in 7 days a week am I going to be able to deliver this on time I got this I'm a beast I'm a 3D modeling Beast I'm a 3D modeling Beast what's going on maybe I don't got [Music] this what the with My Calendar Book for months and this being the only week open it's now or never will I be able to conquer a blender workflow to transform bren's rifle model into a VFX ready Masterpiece with quad apology or will this challenge question my 3D moding Beach title join me as I race the clock to learn new tools and workflows and blender share practical 3D Ming tips and help a fellow 3D artist stay on his 3D Journey stay tuned and witness this 3D models topology transformation I started with the railing body I kind of had to make the names of some of these parts up as they didn't have a real life counterpart to a rifle I copied each piece I was going to work on and pasted it into a clean collection keeping my blender scene organized this was a good confidence Builder to start out in blender because it's a relative simple shape with lots of flat planes flat surfaces are much more more forgiving than curved surfaces in subd modeling I started to rebuild each part based on the existing model this approach isn't always ideal as some of the meshes can take more time to clean up than remodeling from a clean base however without any other references besides this file this was the approach that I was going to have to take first I removed all the holding edges and created large even quads in gons are okay at this point but I wanted a clean base before reinforcing edges with bevels using bevel as holding edges is a quick way to add all your holding edges at once and it's a habit worth developing here's the settings in blender miter outer should be set to Arc this will give you a better Edge layout to quickly quad these Corners out two segments this adds an edge loop on either side retaining your sharp edges shape should be at one this prevents the introduction of a champfer in other software like Maya simply disable the chamfer option to get a nice flat corner with a edge on either side I did spend some time manually cleaning up bevels which is a part of perfecting Edge spacing mastering to apology means having ultimate control of edge flow as automated process like beveling can leave messy results in some areas this corner requires some work to quat out remember you can run an edge into a try to quat it out the knife T blender along with axis constraints is the Lifesaver for continuing edges from bevels I use a reflective surface to test my surfaces and spot any issues reflective surfaces easily show imperfections in Maya you could use a blend Fong or reduce the roughness or increase the metalness for a similar effect building up my confidence in blender I tackled the scope next I repeated the process of stripping away all the holding edges and trying to build some quads especially for the larger shapes focusing on the corners because I know that those Corners are going to need more topology to properly hold those edges I always work on half of the model yet I use a mirror modifier to give me a visual reference of what the Finish shape will look like with limited time I built a library of most used commands via quick favorites mirrors work based of the object's origin so setting the cursor to origin as a quick favorite is a GameChanger I deleted some of the models details like these lines right here as they would be more efficient to create in the texture phase I rebuilt the bolts focusing on the centralized details first which dictate the overall radius in this cylinder's density once the proper topologies in place I extrude it out and I use the loop tools add-on and circle function and in Maya this is called the circularized components after creating the bolt I tackled the large inset where these would be housed using a large cylinder with the same resolution to Boolean out a shape since these shapes were housed on a flat plane I only had to build it once and then duplicate at and then I would be able to stitch and connect this to the other side ensuring perfect topology across both shapes I use a similar process for the bolt openings near the Scopes lens however I created an inset and using the loop tool Circle function instead of a boolean's cutout with most details fleshed out I finished the scope by using the knife tool to connect my bevels to quad everything out cleaning up the topology I duplicated and placed the remaining bolts built the large cylindrical shape and mirrored all my shapes I decided not to rebuild this top railing right now due to time constraints and it looks relatively clean but I might revisit this if I have enough time the first days officially in the books transitioning from my to blender really tested my muscle memory especially grappling with object versus edit mode which is quite different in Maya now I did tackle some of the the simpler Parts first which was kind of a confidence Builder however there's still a bunch of more complex Parts left to build only six days left and I'm already starting to feel like I might be in way over my head tomorrow I got to make up some serious ground before we continue don't forget to grab your free copy of the hard surface chees sheets I've packed this guide with my best apology Secrets refined over the years to help you quickly elevate your 3D modeling to Professional Standards click the YouTube card right here to get your free guide today my goal is to complete this entire large part I'm cleaning up shapes by removing the previous destructive bevels which alter the base shape I start to quad out the large sections although having everything quadded is not necessarily on this first pass of cleanup you can see I'm left with a clean shape that I can now start refining I jumped around different parts of the section this part had many issues so I reduced it to two flat planes and extrude it down extruding Parts with problem topology usually compounds issues by passing down problematic topology through the Extrusion for problematic Parts with extruded depth it's often quicker to rebuild the flat planes first allowing the Extrusion to carry over your topology I repeated the process of removing holding edges cleaning up phases by building up large quads introducing holding edges and applying a final pass to connect smaller polygons from bevels to ensure quads apology for the back of the stock these detached details are often called floaters they can be offset from the mesh and the details can be baked down into normal Maps so while these are perfectly fine for a game production in a subd workflow these must be properly connected to the mesh so I start by working on one half I separate this shape into two parts I have a section with the grip details which I can Bridge down between them to create this wall since these connect to a flat area I won't have many issues now it's a matter of connecting both parts the detached area with the grip details was much denser this issue needs to be corrected since the detailed parts are much denser than the main body we're connecting it to manually adding topology to match Edge counts is often too timec consuming a better workflow is to use a subdivision modifier to subdivide our mesh for a proper connection first we got to tell blender which edges are going to be hard to hold their shape so we do so by selecting all hard edges and setting the mean crease value to one then we apply a level one subdivision modifier to bake in that subdivision which also Smooths out our curvature the my equivalent is to use the crease tool applying a level once move and then deleting the history now we join both parts introduce holding edges and add a small panel line extruding back along the normals to sell the illusion of separate parts with the smaller pieces completed around the rear body body I decided to call it a day I try to find the real names of the rifle parts however some of these had nothing really that match so I kind of had to Wing a lot of these names I didn't get as far as I hoped my original plan was to finish one major part per day and I didn't get to achieve that so I'm officially one day behind schedule and tomorrow's goal is to finish this part no matter what I'm back at it today with the same section my first task was to rebuild these small ribbits the plan is to model this once duplicated and Stitch this throughout the mesh I used an eight-sided Circle as my base which I prefer for cylindrical shapes because it provides perfect symmetry lines across both axises I modeled all these details and added holding edges to complete the final base shape using face snapping ensure that I was on the same exact plane crucial for reconnecting these pieces without causing dents in subdivision mode then I duplicated this Ribbit and plac it throughout the rest of the model I repeated this process to create the radial inset and Stitch both parts into the mesh to see how good they fit so far so good for this vent I cut out the shape with the knife tool and added a bevel to create a nice boundary Loop boundary Loops are great for isolating details and rewriting your Edge flow inward towards your pockets of details I worked my way up the mesh connecting the rest of the ribbits and reworking some Edge flow to reduce endons I added bevels as holding edges for the larger cutouts since this shape was isolated reinforcing these edges is okay however for connected edges I highly recommend doing all your bevels in one soup for reinforcing edges I continued merging ribbits and pill shapes into the mesh if bevels aren't working for you and the mesh is clean it might be a flip normals issue simply activate face orientation in viewport overlays and red faces will mean that your normals are reversed select these faces and go to mesh normals flip your faces are now blue and the bevels should now work flawlessly to create this cutout I duplicated the mesh and used a booon cutout for a perfect subtraction booleans work best with water type meshes so fill any large holes before running boolean's operations with all the details set it was time to quat out the rest of the mesh and apply a bevel to create all the hard edges and that's a wrap for day three it really felt good to knock out the rear body by the end of the third day after another 12 plus hour day in blender the muscle memory is definitely starting to get there however the axy constraints still feel a bit odd especially after years of using the Gizmo in my I am however I am starting to like those constraints because you can combine them with other tools to make them much more powerful 4 days left before I link up with Bren and have to reveal the model with lots of intricate Parts left to do so hopefully I can make up some ground now that I'm becoming a little bit more fluid in my blender workflow now it's time to take on the railing this repeated pattern appears in several parts throughout the model and creating clean repeatable patterns is an essential skill for any hard surface artist to master the first task is to break this down into one clean tilable piece I need to create half of a tilable piece and also the endcaps which are unique details if I get these two parts to fit properly the rest will be easy achieving clean topology involves knowing where to focus and where to let the 3D software replicate your clean meshes throughout the model for this angle since it's not a solid shape I'm using the knife tool to create a manual bevel if you hit C on the knife tool you can cut all the way through with those edges selected hit V for the rip command that will disconnect those components and create a new polygon Island then you can hit L to select that polygon Island and delete the faces with that shape fleshed out I selected the hard edges and beveled them to get my holding edges by now you can see that this is a very formulaic process after everything looks good in subd mode I usually add extra couple of loop cuts to make smaller squares this uniformity divides your mesh and ensure your edges don't slide out too far when going into subd mode now that your pattern is done it's time to add an array modifier to create the entire pattern in Maya you can use a duplicate special for a similar effect with the pattern created I mirror the incap apply my array modifier and merge all my vertices pattern complete now let's create the nozzle the issue here with the topology is that there's a lack of density to support these Corners properly in sub Dem modeling especially for cylindrical shapes details dictate density luckily this can also be broken down into a repeatable pattern using what I call radial symmetry I'm snapping this into the world origin which will make our life much easier make sure your pivot or origin point is in the middle this pattern repeats six times so our initial cylinder needs to be evenly divisible by six think of it as six slices of Pi making a hole I think 12 divisions per slice will give us the right density to hold those Corners properly 12 * 6 = 72 our initial Circle will have 72 sides our slice has 12 faces we only need to work on half since we'll work with symmetry so we'll only select six faces and delete the rest using this method ensures that we can rebuild that one slice to rebuild that entire pie and apply a mirror modifier to make the pattern we need two things an empty as a reference point and an array modifier to make the duplicates apply your transforms here as this might cause issues now add your array and select an empty as your object offset when we rotate our empty we see the duplicates follow we need to find out how many degrees to rotate each slice by in the rotate y we divide 360 by 6 which gives us 60° so we set the count to six and we get our shape back if you need instructions on how to do this in my I've linked a tutorial in the description below our radial symmetry setup is now complete we can work on half of a slice and then the radial symmetry will update the entire shape I deleted the faces to make the opening leaving us with a clean Shell let's add thickness by using a solidify modifier and applying it to bake it in using the scale tool I added slanted edges and used the bevel to add my holding edges my shapes are holding up well so let's merge all the modifiers and apply another mirror modifier to create the entire piece now we can finish the piece by modeling the asymmetrical details always exploit symmetry first and leave asymmetrical details for the very end similar to how character artists flesh out a complete character in Symmetry and then leave facial asymmetry for the very end I created the rest of the nozzle as a separate part with a less dense cylinder remember details dictate density since it's a simple cylindrical part it doesn't need as dense as a mesh to support its shape this took longer than expected with plenty of trial and error and it was quite frustrating workflows that I normally bruise through admire are taking so much longer in blender for instance setting up radial symmetry with three modifiers was tricky to get a hold of I'm getting the hang of blender's modifier stack though especially the solidifier modifier which is great for adding thickness to hard surface models I didn't get through as many parts as I hoped for to date with 3 days left it's crunch time and I've got to push through I can't let brn down today I worked on this first grip I started with the grip details figuring out how to incorporate them into the main mesh I like to tackle the more difficult areas of a model first and usually merging these duplicate details back into the mesh are it to ensure the base of these details lined up with the rest of the body I stripped down one part of the pattern and applied a shrink wrap modifier this ensured that the details fit back onto the surface once duplicated then I rebuilt the extruded details when merging details back into the mesh always ensure your base shapes align I rotated this pattern in World spacing and plants are rotated back into place once finished working in World space especially with patterns makes accurate modeling much easier I use the array modifier to create extra duplicates and compared to the original once everything matched up and the details were clean I moved onto the rest of the grip I added Loop cuts and qued out most of my mesh I like how simple but powerful the join feature and blender is to connect different vertices with edges with a clean base I matched the subdivisions of the grip details to the rest of the body I creased the hard edges and applied a subd modifier with the divisions matched up I joined the parts and started merging vertices the last step was to add this Ribbit detail I cop the pattern from another previous piece snapped it to the faces and merged them throughout the mesh lastly I selected all hard edges and applied beveled voila the first set of grips are officially done and I'm starting to feel pressure well take its grip I'm getting comfortable with blender by now but it feels like there's always a new tool or modifier for me to research and having to spend time figuring out how to use I'm fighing the urge to add too many modifiers to my stack and over complicating my workflow this is kind of like working with photoshop with too many layers and at a certain point you got to merge everything down and commit to some changes with less than 48 hours until I reveal the model to Bren I need to finish every part tomorrow and use that final day to work on scene cleanup double check the entire model for any issues and I'm thinking about doing a little extra surprise to really set this model off today I'm working on the second grip I started using a workflow similar to the previous grip I borrowed the small pattern piece from a previous mesh aligned it to World spacing and created a repeatable pattern with the array modifier I did the usual cleanup routine to create a clean base mesh applied a subd modifier to match the subdivisions and Stitch my details on to the larger piece I borrowed this Ribbit detail from another piece and stitched it into the corner remember never remodel parts that are supposed to be the same when you can simply duplicate them from other parts and rejoin them back into your model this keeps your topology uniform and your patterns consistent I decided to model the bottom of the grip as a separate part I can't tell from the original model what the bottom piece is but I want to add a magazine here to support a Reload animation if you need to create parts that support animation always model them as separate pieces I remodeled the top of this grip selcted all my heart edges and applied bevels to reinforce my shapes finally I rotated the grip back into its original position I just had a major setback Windows decided to reboot erasing all the quick favorites as I didn't save my preferences so that nice Hefty list of quick favorites is all gone and now I have to spend time tracking down these tools within these commands to rebuild build it this is time that I simply just don't have I finished 3D modeling the second grip and I'm definitely much more fluid since I first started I really like the redesign of the magazine that I did especially remodeling it separately to a Reload animation tomorrow I'm revealing the model to Bren and I want to make sure that the model is as perfect as possible I have one more day to go with zero room for error final day it's now or never I decided to revisit the top railing I had already created this pattern from a previous part so this would be an easy task I broke down the pattern once more to one piece and rebuilt it to match the length of the top railing then I made sure that every part was properly mirrored I finished the entire model cleaned up the scene and named each Single part which is actually a crucial practice especially for teamwork environments like Studio settings I really wanted to impress Bren and show him the rifle coming together piece by piece so I took it into Maya to make this cool animation of all the parts coming together this is one of the advantages of modeling every part separately is that you can do these cool Breakaway animations some people actually call them exploded views the model definitely ended up quite a bit different from the original file that Brent sent me I had to make some design choices and leave out some of the areas that were unclear from his initial blockout some areas were simplified and some other areas I would have left out and tackled in the texturing phase overall I'm pleased on how it turned out I hope Bren feels inspired when he sees it and I wanted to show them that creating an asset like this with proper topology for subd is not impossible possible it just takes a little bit of practice so let's jump on the call and see what Bren thinks about the [Music] model so this is what you uh sent me right here from your messages uh you basically said that you wanted this to be a subd model with clean topology so you went through the process of doing this and this does look like a game ASA you have the floaters here and the creasing but looks like you wanted to convert this into a subd mod and that's where topology clean quad topology is going to come into play so this is what you sent me and um I worked very hard to convert this game model into a subd model and I could tell you're uh you're excited and I'm excited to show you [Music] oh it looks really good man nice very nice very nice that's it so this is your model I'll bring the updated version yeah I mean it looks really good man like I'm speechless it looks really good yeah it was uh definitely um a lot of work and and I actually did this in BL which I'm not that experienced yeah um the only reason I brought it back to Maya is to do the animation cuz like I said I'm I'm relatively new with blender so but um I documented the whole process I I had to do a lot of cleanup for the model and it actually I I deviated quite a bit I only went off that file and it looked like it was kind of a work in progress um I had to kind of like make some things up cuz I I didn't have really any reference besides the model there were a lot of things that were not clean even in the low poly like a lot of the shapes were slanted I basically had to like remove a lot of that geometry and kind of rebuild everything I used much more subdivisions and I just started clean adding holding edges and kind of gradually building up the divisions there really helped me out it Wass really nice better than mine subd modeling is uh pretty difficult is a craft that takes a while to learn but uh there's there's a lot of modeling techniques too that would help you out and you'll see throughout the video basically I just really wanted to do weapons cuz I haven't done weapons and um it's actually something that I really want to do as well aside from doing uh basically just hard surface modeling is something that I really wanted I think you you kind of like really understand what it takes to convert you know like a game model to subd especially when I when I release the video so if you got you know any questions you know I'm always around you can catch me on Discord and you know don't hesitate to reach out yep I I'll sure will okay man all right have a great one bye yeah peace bye on the call Brendan mentioned that this was indeed a video game asset that he started by following a tutorial and I can kind of tell by the way that his initial model was and even the floaters that he had so if you're interested in creating sci-fi weapons for video games I'm going to go ahead and drop the link in the description down below so you can check out the tutorial but essentially Bren started trying to create a video game asset and somewhere along the line he decided that he wanted a VFX model with proper topology started a struggle and decided to ask me for help so while his initial approach for creating the model for a video game workflow would have worked the process that we went through in this video was necessary to convert it into a subd bfx model so hopefully you enjoyed watching this entire process what was your biggest takeaway from this video let me know in the comment sections down below my second completed blender model is officier in the books if you thought I went through some blender growing paines throughout this process and you want to check out how my blender Journey started with my first model then you should check out this video right here

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 42,985

Keywords: blender tutorial, 3d modeling, blender 3d, blender progress, blender progression, blender for beginners, blender tutorial for beginners, 3d modeling blender, 1 month blender progression, 3d modeling for beginners, blender tutorial 4.0, blender 3d tutorial, blender 3d modeling, blender 3d modeling tutorial, blender progress 30 days, blender progress 2 years, blender progress 1 month, 3d modeling tutorial, how to learn blender 4.0, how to learn blender modeling

Id: 6XYekp0-NUw

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2024